Corporate media begins covering its ass on the 2024 election

With the economy humming along and Americans continuing to see the threat to democracy, reporters are pulling punches on their own polls showing Trump winning.

The economy is booming, with 2023 defying all expectations, and a recession is in the rearview window.

Gas prices are down. So is inflation. Wages are up, and so is the stock market.

President Biden begins 2024 with better poll numbers. This, even as the polls right now—as I’ve warned—are too problematic to judge the November election on.

The point is, way too many facts on the ground and everywhere else are changing, and suddenly the corporate media is trying to cover its ass.

The New York Times polling analyst Nate Cohn—the one who ramped up the rest of the media with New York Times/Siena College polls of battleground states back in November showing Trump beating Biden—sees what’s going on and, like much of the rest of the media, appears worried about his reputation. He likely realizes that the Times ran well over 50 stories based on that one set of polls, using them to show Trump surging in all manner of ways on various issues.

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So, today Cohn published a piece about President Harry Truman, whose approval was worse than Biden’s at this point in time in 1948 and was trailing Republican Thomas Dewey in polls even as the economy was surging. Despite of all the media predictions, Truman won re-election.

It was among the ultimate moments of the media getting an election wrong: the iconic “Dewey Beats Truman” headline from the Chicago Daily Tribune, published late on election night before some states had reported results, was a major embarrassment for a paper that criticized Truman throughout the campaign and predicted he’d lose.

The point of Cohn’s piece was to say media can be wrong, was wrong and could be wrong again—because it now looks more than ever like the Times polling and his analysis from November were quite overblown.

Regarding what’s happening in 2024, of course gas prices and the stock market are not anything the president has control over, nor predictive of the economy’s health—yet President Biden got blamed when they went the wrong way—but perception, compounded by a lazy media that allows that perception, is everything.

And many of the facts on the ground have been positive for President Biden for a long time—from Democrats over-performing the polls for almost two years to the economy refusing to go into a recession—as I and many others have been reporting. Trump’s threat to the nation and the attack on January 6th didn’t just magically disappear. And, contrary to the media’s predictions, abortion rights exploded as an issue rather than fading away soon after the fall of Roe (an idea the press promoted that was preposterous).

So I’m not saying that things have suddenly changed, since many of us have seen a lot of this all along. But what is suddenly changing is the media’s coverage of it all—and in particular the coverage by political reporters. Too much has happened for political reporters to continue with the horse race coverage only—plus, they’ve been pushed (shamed in some cases) to report more on the stakes in the election rather than the odds, thanks to people like influential media professor Jay Rosen, and to focus on Trump’s fascistic vision for the future.

That, to me, does tell us something. Too often in the corporate media, reporters worry first and foremost about themselves and their careers. Getting scoops—and doing it via access journalism, which has them pandering to politicians—is a high priority. So high that they’ll paper over reality, make things seem more dire, and make a race appear tighter, for as long as they can if it will benefit them.

But at a certain point, things change so much, too fast, that they risk looking out of touch, or worse, like the pandering access-obsessed individuals that they are.

I think we’ve reached that point. The flaws in the polling are showing—flaws that have been evident in the 2023 elections and 2022 mid-terms, when Republicans were supposed to have a red wave. Interestingly, a poll about the Colorado Supreme Court’s ruling removing Trump from the ballot might have sent a message too. It showed 54% approving of the ruling and only 35% disapproving.

How could Trump be winning the 2024 election with only 35% of voters disapproving of removing him from the ballot and a majority favoring it? Sure, it was just one poll, but it’s in line with many polls since January 6th that showed a majority believed Trump should not be allowed to run for president again.

This revealed how things weren’t adding up when it came to the media’s horse race polling. That, coupled with the economic news, perhaps has a lot of political reporters re-evaluating or re-strategizing—or whatever word you want to use—how they’re framing the outcome of the election. And that can only clarify for the public just where things are, and surely underscores why people must work hard and certainly not give up hope as we face the authoritarian threat.